Before the GStreamer libraries can be used,
gst_init has to be called from the main
application. This call will perform the necessary initialization
of the library as well as parse the GStreamer-specific command
line options.

A typical program
[1]
would have code to initialize
GStreamer that looks like this:

Use the GST_VERSION_MAJOR,
GST_VERSION_MINOR and GST_VERSION_MICRO
macros to get the GStreamer version you are building against, or
use the function gst_version to get the version
your application is linked against. GStreamer currently uses a
scheme where versions with the same major and minor versions are
API-/ and ABI-compatible.

It is also possible to call the gst_init function
with two NULL arguments, in which case no command line
options will be parsed by GStreamer.